Sound, audio, music systems

From an Idea to Lines of Code

There have been so many success stories about people who have made their own apps and put them online for other people to download. There is one guy who made a simple app where you control a bird who flies up and down while dodging some pipes. It’s the simplest game you can ever think of, yet people downloaded it by the millions. The simplest ideas are the ones that really make you frustrated, because you realize that you could have done it too. I contacted a Singapore app developer for an idea that I had for a game.

My game wasn’t as simple as the one with the bird and the pipes. My game was a platform game with action moves. I was influenced by a lot of old platforming games that I played when I was a child. It’s my favorite game genre because the action and stage exploration is something that I enjoy. These games usually have all kinds of crazy abilities for the player to use, and there are boss battles that test the player with difficult challenges. Putting something like that into a phone app with good controls isn’t the easiest thing in the world to do, but I was determined to have my game made.

The developer and I worked closely together to turn my dream into a reality. We spent a lot of time working back and forth to test the game and make sure that it played exactly like how I wanted it to play. For some, touch controls aren’t good enough for games, so I asked the developer to add in a function where a phone could connect to an external controller, either by using a bluetooth connection or a cable connection. The dedicated buttons really come in handy with tight controls in platform games.